Living on the edge of homelessness

PORTSMOUTH — She was an accomplished instructor at Ballet New England, owned and operated a restaurant in the 1980s and worked with the homeless and the disadvantaged for many years.

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By Joey Cresta

seacoastonline.com

By Joey Cresta

Posted Jan. 6, 2013 at 2:00 AM

By Joey Cresta

Posted Jan. 6, 2013 at 2:00 AM

» Social News

PORTSMOUTH — She was an accomplished instructor at Ballet New England, owned and operated a restaurant in the 1980s and worked with the homeless and the disadvantaged for many years.

And now, Diane Bundow is homeless herself.

Bundow, 77, a New York native who has lived on the Seacoast since 1976, has been living at a Portsmouth hotel since a week before Christmas. For around 20 days, she has been confined to one room, with two twin-sized beds, a small television and little else besides a handful of books scattered around the room.

"I'm not ready to sit down. I've just about had as much reading of books as I can handle," she said.

Bundow walks with a cane and has spent the past year recovering from severe ulcers that sapped her energy and forced her to stop working as a volunteer coordinator at Cross Roads House homeless shelter on Lafayette Road. Once someone who helped prepare meals for the homeless, she now unexpectedly finds herself dangerously close to having no roof over her head.

She said she is moving into a room at the Port Inn on the Route 1 Bypass because it is a little bit cheaper than the room she was staying in during an interview Thursday with Seacoast Sunday, but she knows she will still be unable to afford paying the weekly rates to stay at local inns or motels.

"The money will run out shortly. Then I'll really be in trouble," she said.

Bundow said the ideal situation would be to find someone in the area who is looking for a roommate. She said she can cook, help around the house and contribute to any mortgage payments. She even put a listing in the Portsmouth Herald offering her services for a place to stay.

"I know there are a good number of single older people who have houses (who) would take advantage of having another body in the house," she said. "Some sort of equitable arrangement. To me that seems really reasonable. Maybe people are afraid to have somebody in their house."

Bundow admits she may have made some mistakes that have put her in the position she is in now. After her medical problems, a doctor recommended she stay at the Edgewood Centre nursing home in Portsmouth. She said she was there almost a year, but chose to leave because she did not feel like she fit in. Also, she said they wanted to provide her with transitional housing that would have connected her with someone who would help her with grocery shopping, doing laundry and other chores around the house.

"I said no. I don't need help," she said. "To me it seems wrong to tie up somebody who's going to do this when there are people who do need (help)."

She said she was on a Portsmouth Housing Authority waiting list to obtain affordable housing, but declined an offer the agency made because she did not like the reputation of the particular place that was offered to her. She admits that, too, may have been a mistake, as now she's around 20th on waiting lists for two other PHA properties.

Bundow acknowledged her background in ballet — the need for discipline, the striving for perfection — may contribute to her stubborn ways now. But she said all she is looking for is the right situation, which would be easier to find if there were more affordable housing options available in the area.

"What I need is a place to live. The very next thing will be some kind of vehicle and a part-time job," she said. "The disinterest in affordable housing is just awful. It isn't that people are needing housing for nothing, and it doesn't need to be Taj Mahal."

Craig Welch, the new director of the Portsmouth Housing Authority, agreed there is a need in the city for more affordable housing options. The agency owns and/or manages 580 apartment units in the city, not including those that fall under Section 8 housing. But its current waiting list is 763 people long, and its Section 8 waiting list has more than 900 names on it, he said.

"Generally, we're talking, for Portsmouth residents, a year on the waiting list. For non-residents it could be two or more years," he said.

Welch said seniors, the disabled and Portsmouth residents all receive preference for public housing. Those who apply also can state a preference for certain units, and everyone has the right to decline the first offer. Declining a second offer will drop the person to the bottom of the waiting list, he said.

Welch said some PHA properties are more desirable than others, though "every place is clean" and meets the authority's high standards. He said about half of affordable housing units in the city are for families and the other half are for seniors. However, due to federal regulations, senior housing in buildings such as Margeson and Feaster apartments must also be open to younger disabled people, Welch said.

"We can't deny you an apartment as a younger disabled person just because the building is designed as senior housing. This is one of the big challenges that we have in Portsmouth," he said. "We have some properties that are approaching 50 percent younger disabled and these are generally considered elderly developments, but they're very much mixed properties."

Cathy Kuhn, director of the New Hampshire Coalition to End Homelessness, said a lack of affordable housing is, alongside poverty, a primary contributor to the problem of homelessness. She said while "no one is homeless by choice," some people do not want to live at a shelter and need access to affordable housing to feel "safe and dignified."

"While shelters are certainly extremely important resources ... they're not the end-all, be-all solution. Ultimately, we need more affordable housing," she said.

The coalition recently released the State of Homelessness in New Hampshire Report for 2012. The report indicated the number of households in poverty that spend more than 50 percent of their income on rent increased from 65 percent in 2009 to 68.3 percent in 2010. The report states the level of "severe housing cost burden" can be an important indicator of the level of difficulty that those in poverty face in obtaining housing in a particular area and that Rockingham County has the highest rate of severe housing cost burden in the state at 74.7 percent.

Exacerbating the problem, Welch said, is the fact that developing new affordable housing options is nearly impossible in Portsmouth. He said he could not envision any other large-scale developments like Wamesit Place or Gosling Meadows, but that there may be possibilities for smaller-scale affordable housing developments in the future.

"The challenge, I think, in Portsmouth is not a lack of support," he said. "I think people understand the need. ... But there's few opportunities to do real estate development in Portsmouth, no matter what kind of development it is. (We need to) bring our resources or other resources (together) to make sure there are still places in Portsmouth that remain permanently affordable. It starts to price people out more and more, especially the elderly and disabled."